 from the US and good afternoon to people coming from the UK and other European countries. We still have two minutes, according to my clock anyway, until the official starting time and because we have quite a few more people registered for this webinar. I hope you don't mind waiting another few minutes and I can share my camera as well so that you can actually see a talking hand as well. So as I said, welcome everybody. Good morning to people joining us from the US and good afternoon to our participants joining from European countries. Today's webinar is called how to design open badges and I would like to keep it or make it as interactive as possible but as you know, we only have one hour for this hands-on activity or webinar. So we probably won't be able to do too much collaboration and creative work, but hopefully you will still be able to get some useful tips. Many of you probably already know Ethan, you participated some of the webinars before but for those of you who don't or those who will be just reviewing the recording of this webinar quickly, the European Distance and e-learning network is the most comprehensive association of its kind in Europe. We have been registered and going since 1991. Our secretariat is now in Hungary but we are UK registered organization and our aim is to provide a platform for a professional collaboration and information exchange for our partners and our members. We are very inclusive. We have members from every level and sector of education, K-12, higher education, adult education, vocational education and training and our membership is open to institutions as well as individuals and larger networks and national organizations. We are trying to organize collaborative events for our members and partners. These are face-to-face events, conferences and seminars, workshops, as well as some virtual events like today's webinar, for example. And also try to participate in our partners and members, EU funded projects to support their research and practice and disseminate the information and the outputs of these projects. And of course, one thing that we are very keen on is to recognize professional excellence in this very agile area and quickly changing the environment of open education and distance and e-learning. So the OpenBatch network, the project that is inevitable for us to present today's webinar, is an EU funded project. It's a European Union Erasmus Plus program funded initiative. You see the URL to the project website on the top of the slide. And if you click there and register on the registration link, I think it's on the top right side of the page, you will be able to enroll in a MOOC that will be a lot more detailed course for you, a non-formal course for you to truly learn how to design online open badges. As I said, today is just going to be a very, very quick demonstration to give you a little bit of a teaser. The OpenBatch network is supporting the development of the OpenBatch ecosystem, promoting the use of open badges and to recognize non-formal and informal learning. We have a great variety of practical use cases on the website. If you would like to feel encouraged to copy somebody else's examples or submit your own and get feedback from your peers, you're more than welcome to fill in the template or just to browse the existing use cases. We have highly valuable discussion papers for individuals as well as organizations. These are the papers where you can read about the skeptical opinions about the use and the value of the open badges as well as the successful use cases at different types of institutions and organizations. We have discussion papers on OpenBatch policies. And as I mentioned earlier, we are designing a MOOC. It's nearly ready. It will be piloted early next year. So please don't forget to register there and you will get information or a heads up when we start the piloting. Why use open badges? Unfortunately, I can only supply European statistics or data, but I am pretty sure it's the same situation all over the world and the US particularly that our jobs in the near future, but definitely by 2020, 90% of our jobs are going to require digital skills or 21st century skills. And in many cases, these skills are so much more important and valuable for people to get employed that in many cases they may be considered more important than formal degrees. And here we have a little quote from McKinsey report, Education to Employment, Getting Europe's Youth into Work, according to which, although 74% of the universities consider that they are preparing their graduates for the world of work, only 38% of their graduates agree with this and only 35% of the employers agree with this statement. I wonder if you see the raise your hand icon in the top right corner of your Adobe Connect tool. I wonder if I could ask our American participants to raise your hands if you are from the US, because I would like to ask someone to say whether they agree or disagree with this statement or if it's the same situation in the US, please feel free to just leave a comment in the chat box if you prefer. But as I said, I think I'm quite convinced that it's very much the same situation in the US as well. Yeah, I don't see any hands, although I'm quite convinced that some of us are from the US. Don't be shy. There you go, John. John, would you like the microphone and tell us where you're from and what you know about the US situation, about employment and the user? Okay, no problem. Let's move on then. So the open badges, why we like using them is that because they're very versatile, very adaptable, they're also stackable. But what differentiates the open badges from just a standard CV where people can list their skills and competences is they are standardized, they are evidence-based, verifiable, portable and shareable. And these agile attributes are really differentiating open badges from other types of informal, non-formal credentials. And we in the Open Badge Network believe that this is going to be a very strong way of micro-credentialing informally and non-formally acquired skills and competences. And I would also like to ask a question to all of you before we get into the design. Can you please raise your hand if you are badge advocates? If those of you who like and believe in the value of open badges, can you please raise your hand? Just so that I know if I'm talking to the converted or... Okay, that's very reassuring. Thank you so much. You can lower your hands now. And are the others skeptics? Can you please raise your hand if you are not quite sure if the value of open badges is going to make them some kind of a quality currency in the future? That's very reassuring. Or you're just very shy. But thank you very much. It's good to know that we are all believing in the future of open badges. So let's move on to the design process. As I said before, we are going to use digital means the badge design canvas. And we are going to set the criteria or show you how to set the criteria, which is the heart and the key to the quality of the badges. Those people who are more skeptics about badges, most of the times they are so because they have seen weaker badges. Badges are not just a pretty button that you pin on the label of your jacket. It's a lot more sophisticated and detailed than that. We will get back to that later. We will have to identify a badgeable skill, knowledge or behavior. Identify who our badges are for or in this case the badge that we are going to design. Have a value proposition for all the stakeholders, earners as well as the issuers, audience and displayer. Think about the learning pathways, not forget about the resources that are necessary for the design of the badges and sustainability, the future of your badges and your badge ecosystem or portfolio. And the fun part of course is the graphical design at the end, but that always comes at the end once you already have the whole concept. As I said earlier, what makes a badge, I don't know how much you can see the slide. They may look pretty small, but in theory on the top right corner of the slide box, you see an icon with four arrows pointing to the corners of the square. If you click on that button, it will enlarge the slides and you will be able to read them, but it's probably not very necessary and you may prefer to just read the chat during the presentation. But what I was going to say is that the badge is not just a badge image. There's a lot of metadata behind it, as you probably already know. This is about 90 percent of the badge content that is not visual and that's behind the pretty face. And now let's move on to the badge that we are going to design today. This is the badge that you're going to receive after this week, your webinar participant badge. And this is how it looks in the tool that we use to design and issue our own badges. So there is the image about the badge. It has a title or a name. There's a short description. You can see who has issued it and click on the links of the issue organization. There's a contact email address and there are evidences behind that badge like here, the resources section gives you access to the presentation slides and the webinar recording. It always has an issuing date and sometimes also an expiration date depending on what kind of badge you designed and the issue. And a couple of tags, a few tags that you can use to make your badges more broadly recognized if it's freely accessible on the internet. About the versatility of the badges, people usually mention the scouts badges and the army badges. We all know those, but in fact it's not uncommon at all and you probably all know digital badges as well. Many of these you probably recognize from this screen. Others you don't. I wanted to include several different types that you may be familiar with or that would probably increase your trust in the value of badges. I would say if the BBC and Siemens are using open badges, then they probably have the expertise and the know how to bat safely on this innovation. But it could be anything as you know in gaming there are badges. Even a barista could get a badge for being able to make a flat white. So there's a very, very wide scale of using open badges. So this is how the open badge design canvas looks like. And we're going to go through these boxes and fill in with the information about our badge, the webinar participant badge. But what I would also like you to do just I will pause for a moment and think about what badge you might want to design for yourself. If you had not one, but three hours, it is quite a lengthy procedure. And if you were in a face-to-face situation, I would probably sit you in groups of three or four and ask you to come up with an idea of a badge and work on the canvas together. But we don't have that time. So maybe next time or when you review the video recording, you could just get a print out of the canvas in front of you, pause the video when you get to the different points and fill it in for yourself. So I wonder if you could just tell me or writing the chat box if you can prepare with an idea of what you would like to badge. I see people typing. That's very good. Thank you very much. Reaching various points, point totals and online force. Employability skills. Very good. Let's remember that because we'll get back to that a bit later, the employability skills. Creating short animated films for learning. That's very good as well. I'll get back to that later as well when we come to the evidences. Okay. Continue typing if you wish. But as I said, we are going to pretend that we just came up with the idea of badging your bed in our participation. So this is not a cheat. Obviously, the image came after the concept. But just so that you can have the final goal in front of your eyes, this is the final look, the surface of the badge we are going to design, the webinar participant. So we have to think about the audience and the value of our badge. Who is this badge for? This is for you. The professionals who don't necessarily require formal recognition of their learning. You're quite happy to just have some kind of informal certification or notification of your attendance. But you probably would appreciate to have some kind of recognition for you devoting a whole hour of your time to sit through this presentation. The badge issuer is obviously the webinar organizer, which is Eden. The audience, the consumer, these terms are important to be able to differentiate between is the person or the organization who is looking at the badge that you have earned. So once you display the badge, you don't have to. If you don't think that a badge that you were issued is not valuable for yourself, you can just hide it in your Mozilla backpack. But if you think that one badge has a particular value because there's a very solid evidence behind the badge, then you may want to showcase that to either your prospective employer when you're applying for a job, to show it to your peers, to show it to your colleagues or your department, so that people have a point of reference as of what you are capable of doing that they don't. For example, in this case, if you learn how to create and issue open badges, some of your colleagues may think, oh, that's interesting if I have a question related to that I know whom to turn to. So the opportunities that badges can unlock that some of you may be familiar with is a new way of considering continuous professional development. When you can mark the milestones of your progress or when you have evidence of your informal and volunteering activities, it's very nice to see that kind of a map of your achievements or your plans. You may take notice of badges that you just would like to pursue in the future and come back to later when you have time to learn something new. You may also be able to identify your skill gaps if you see a collection of badges, for instance, about your digital competences, and you do a self-evaluation test. You may recognize that although you might be strong in certain areas, you might be not so strong in other areas. Another EU project of ours that is called LN4 work, it's actually studying in research is exactly that. And what that project is doing lets you go through a self-evaluation questionnaire, and once you identified your skill gaps, it will offer you MOOCs and other open educational resources to learn to improve those weaker skills. It's a very creative way and a flexible way of organizing your non-academic and informal achievements. As I said before, it's one thing to put on your CV that you're an excellent team worker or a great presenter, but there's not a solid evidence then showing a video of your presentation behind a badge. So if your prospective employer is interested at your presentation skill, they can just click on the badge and then within that on the link and see your presentation slides or see the recording of your presentation, etc. You can also cluster similar achievements. If you're a big webinar goer, you may be able to showcase 10, 20 webinar participation in badges so that the people who are reviewing your skills and interests might notice that you are very good at and very determined to continuously improve yourself professionally. And wherever the user find out about the badges, it could be the Eden website where we talk about the recognition of professional excellence. It could be partner communications, in this case communications from USDA or the open badge network project. There are conference and seminar presentations that could channel people to the badges and the courses. There could be open badge databases. There are several of these. These are where, for instance, if you would like to learn something and you look in a badge database, for example, coding or how to write a CV or how to apply for certain types of funds, you can find a badge for that and probably behind that badge there's a link to a course that you can complete to get that to earn that badge. And you also find the endorsers who already promote these badges. Why bother earning the badge? It's a sense of achievement and it builds your confidence when you know that you get something. I don't know how many of you have small children but if you remember the face of your child when they come home with a sticker on their chest there are just so happy and us adults are not that much different from this point of view. I think the confidence building in the sense of achievement may be very important. Again, please remember that it's not just hoarding all kinds of stuff. You have to apply critical thinking to what badges have value and whatnot but I think you know what I mean. Informal but official recognition of achievement. If you have a LinkedIn profile and you have ever been endorsed for a skill that you actually don't possess you know what I mean when I say that the endorsing badges and get the peer recognition that way can be so much more powerful because you are actually showcasing skills that you can prove you possess. And then if people say yes indeed this people is very good at open badge design because we have worked together and you get the thumbs up on that evidence skill not just a made up one. And you also have a point of reference and evidence to new knowledge skills and achievements so you don't forget maybe in two years time you won't remember one hour that you attended but if you have your badge backpack where you can see in a certain cluster or collection your short trainings you will be able to recall these smaller achievements and events. For the issuer recognizing excellence I think it's very important from many of the examples that you put in the chat box I think you find it important to to award these badges to the people whose employment or employability skills you would like to endorse those people who you would like to empower that they are able to create those short animated films etc. You can make your brand more wider known by awarding these badges and these badges appearing in people's CVs on their LinkedIn profile in their e-portfolio and if it's a strong badge or can be seen many times other viewers might click on these links and get to know you your institution your community your volunteer group etc. It may be an incentive for modernization like in case of Eden we are very happy to be able to say that we were pioneers and one of the first to to try to use open badges for recognition of informal learning and to raise interest if you see it out there then you will ask what it is. The audience the consumers again awareness of the initiative identifying the interest of the person so if your prospective employer looks at your badge backpack or your CV or LinkedIn profile with the badges they will certainly be able to identify your professional interest where how you're developing yourself what's your niche of research for example or practice and often this could be this could be a big difference like if you're applying for a job I think I spoken up there's there's room here to ask another question and has any of you ever had to interview someone for a role or a position within your institution or organization can you please raise your hand okay I won't make you have to speak but you can you can comment in the chat box what I would like to know is how often did you put very much significance on the formal qualification and the degree and the grades and how often did you look for soft skills when you were interviewing a person how how much more important or is it more important to have to employ someone who has a strong degree from a very reputable university for example or would you rather have someone who is the adaptable and creative and has the soft skills mm-hmm depends a bit on the jobs certainly that's the the example of the heart surgeon obviously it's very important for for certain jobs particularly technical ones that the the heart skills and the experience and the qualification is there mm-hmm thank you okay meanwhile the displayer what's in it for the displayer by displayer we mean LinkedIn your institutional moodle the e-portfolios websites etc for them it is the reputation that you you go to them to to store and display your badges they they strive to build a community around certain clusters of skills and badges they they want to enforce the loyalty in their community so you you obviously need to keep in mind when you're designing your badge whether you fulfill these needs of the displayer as well when you create your badges and again just for the tiny moment to go back to the issuer what's in it I mentioned the value recognition but I would also like to point out the the statistical records for example of the acceptance rate since we started using open badges at Eden we have already noticed which ones of our badges are more valuable from the point of view of the higher acceptance rate and which ones are the less valuable if you like as I said before the the quality is in the eye of the beholder so it's it may be different quality that is required by one user earner and by another but you can probably get a better acceptance rate if your your badge is well designed for the the stakeholders you are you are targeting and widening the random service recognition as I said before if our participant badges are all over the world then Eden will get noticed and so will your organization skills knowledge competences and behaviors very quickly what you have so if if I give you a webinar participant badge okay so what but if you look into the actual skills knowledge competences and behaviors that it demonstrates it might suddenly get a bit greater value when when your skill like when your badge means to the viewer or the consumer that you have the ability to to learn in an informal non-formal way that you demonstrate your professional commitment to to learn informally and participate webinars if you have the curiosity and openness to innovation to check out new things if you have the independence to to manage your learning and fit in that one hour to attend a webinar as I said if we had a face-to-face event you would sit together in smaller groups and you would practice your collaboration and teamwork skills as well as your communication as well as your critical thinking what works what doesn't and maybe specific knowledge skill or ability to design a badge or to to create an animated video these kind of things so think about these when you go through the the canvas feeling okay and evidence if Christa said the the animated videos if you avoid a video or animation creation badge to people who go through a course or a similar webinar than this one and by the end of the course they are able to create a short video then they could just put it up on a youtube account and share the link so on one hand some of the evidence is coming from the issuer like in in the webinar's case Eden will be putting some of the background information the metadata behind the badge and it will say that this person has attended it's it's proven that I will go through the list of the registrations I will go through the list of the participants here in the adobe connect room and those registered people who have not attended they are not going to receive the badge but this is something that I have to do to be able to keep the value to to be able to say confidently that it's only those people who have sat through attentively this one hour who received this badge of course you can always cheat there may be someone who just looked in and went to have a coffee or not paying attention or multitasking and not picking up everything but you do the same thing when you're writing your cv so it's it's really up to your discipline and what matters is that we have faith in the people who try to demonstrate their skills and competences there could be a self assessment test if you are trying to somebody somebody said that it's the that the two to collect let me check two quotes from the chat box reaching various point totals in course in online course this is if you can demonstrate and connect these with the and prove in the badge that you have received those points that's an evidence completion of tasks again as I said if there's a there's a coursework by the end of which you have an assignment that you submitted and you can create a pdf and upload it that's that's a perfect evidence or publishing results pretty much the same thing and endorsements we were also discussed that you may receive a badge for for something that you have done but then later on you may have done something similar and the people you were in touch with collaborating and demonstrating the same skill could go back to that one badge and without issuing you another one say yes this skill is valid we have done something similar together and the person personally demonstrated their ability to for example design an open badge then the learning pathways that you also are recommended to consider is before you get started map your learning offering you want to see the big picture and you want to organize your learning offering because if you zoom in on a single thing just to experiment it will you will have to undo the whole thing and start again so the first thing you do is start from a couple of steps back and then zoom in on the one example that you would like to further elaborate consider your options for improvement and expansion that for example if you if you can badge one course or if you can badge one type of activity or a skill and how can you how can you do or or adapt that to to other learning circumstances and there are different types of badges like type type badges if you imagine a pie of several slices maybe you would like to badge something big but that big is not that tangible so you would say okay this great complex sophisticated competency consists of several different skills and if you can for example demonstrate your communication skills or presentation skills your leadership skills your whatever that all together become the mega scale or something you can also do level up badges when you have bronze silver or gold this could be based on the the performance and the results or stacking up similar type badges like if you have attended 10 even webinars then you will get a bronze or silver or gold badge and people will know that you are instead of displaying 10 15 20 badges you will display that one single gold behind which there's that stacked multiple badges and connect with parallel relevant external learning resources if you have any you should be able to link them in in your criteria list and evidence list and allow learners and prospective badge earners to explore and engage if you have a greater portfolio for example we heard earlier today in the other webinar that migrants in Europe would be are a very important target audience at the moment to to teach to fit in to find new jobs to translate their their qualifications we see that home into the European language if you like for them to be able to see what's on offer and how they can engage with online courses formal or informal this is your own interest to to be able to be found by your target audiences and as always this is most important to be creative and adaptable and consult consult with your peers consult with your audiences do a focus group that will help you save failure time and and the dead end roots in your your work regarding the size of a badge are there any rules and good practice around how big a chunk of a pie should be no that that's the brilliance in my opinion of open badges is that they are so adaptable and versatile it's really up to you how much do you think what what you are offering or what you are micro credentialing is is worth is it something that has relevance in a certain professional community even if it's a tiny thing is it like if you're at a university if you're a university lecturer or practitioner and is it going to be a series of courses that stack up at the end of the curriculum as a degree or would it be would the pie be the course or the degree would the would the pie be a series of digital skills it's really up to you this is why you really have to do your research and and find out what you're aiming to achieve with your badges so that it has value to yourself and your badge owners earners we're nearly there at the end promise that there are only two slides left okay I think Lista would like to say something do you have a microphone no okay sorry Karen I see a green tick mark next to your name would you like to get the microphone okay that's the one we still have we still have plenty of that and so resources and sustainability very important you don't want to invest time into something that doesn't take off so what you would like to consider that you have to invest into this process is that you do have to devote some time and save some time for the concept development and that partly is the filling in of the canvas and although this canvas is super simple because it has to be adaptable to all these different types of learning and badging because as I said it could be something formal education related it could be something that is a practical skill like the flat white barista it could be something like a nurses skill it could be something like a digital competence and this canvas should be able to guide you through the design process whatever type of badge you are designing and I didn't say this before but obviously there are lots of other guidelines available online we use the digital means open badge design canvas because they are one of the project partners and they could introduce this tool to us and we are very familiar with it and it works but you can use any guidelines and maybe even experiment with the badge design process on your own I mentioned before that you have to align with the curriculum or competency framework and this is where I would like to come back to that point raised in the chat box earlier that for example in in Europe we have lots of competency frameworks and my impression since I think it was two weeks ago that we attended Mozilla's most best in in London vintage and one of the outcomes of the the festival or the conference on the open badge floor was that there's there's an initiative to connect open badges with the competency frameworks so if you already have a well-developed framework of competencies and skills and often these are super super complex like for different types of tradesmen for example or different types of professions I mentioned the nurses before but if the same applies to carpenters or the digital competencies and some official bodies are working to to develop these frameworks so that they are complex and comprehensive you don't have to reinvent the wheel if you know what you're working with and what you aspire to to connect your badges with it only gives credit to your your badge if you are able to say that this badge is demonstrating this and this and this skill and competence that is defined like this so if you have a clear definition of what you mean by digital information processing or internet safety because you can get the definition from the framework or you can get the the the scales or the the levels of proficiency from an official framework that defines what makes a certain level that level then that gives them an amazing amount of credibility and value and and credit to your to your badge. Needless to say you have to have the time and the skills to design your badge maybe you are creative and you can scribble something or you know how to use Adobe Photoshop or some other kind of graphical design software you might be resourceful enough to to find or buy images online there are a lot of icon finder websites from where which you can download entire sets of different types of icons that you could use to to develop your the graphical or the visual images of your badges. You might just want to hire someone to do that and actually many of the badge designing software or tools or platforms allow you to create your open badges I think in the useful resources there is in the bottom left corner there is a link to a platform where you can actually choose from a very limited number of shapes and forms and colors but it would probably give you a good enough idea how to create a badge and if you're just experimenting it's probably more than enough to to see how a badge would look like at the end and also the the same platforms or similar platforms are available to create and issue the badges and you have to you decide whether you want to invest into membership or of these platforms or issue manually that's probably depending on how many people and how frequently you're issuing your badges that could be extremely time-consuming to attach the jpeg or png file to your emails and make sure that they are not being used by somebody else. The badges that are issued through these professional platforms are really safe and it's not possible to claim badges unless you are the actual earner of the badge but this usually costs money. You have to have time or devote time to create support material for your badges as I said the the evidence background and the metadata to create issue and reissue the individual badges you might have the webinar participant badge available but for every single webinar you're organizing the the background is going to be different because it's a different slideshow it's a different webinar recording it's a different subject etc so the picture might be the same but you have to rephrase the metadata and change your tags and and change the resources and I mentioned before to evolve your open batch portfolio once you get started you will probably get new ideas and you just keep going and for for the webinar participant you will do the webinar facilitator that's a whole different range of skills that it demonstrates you you will move to face-to-face events you might want to change the color and have subsections of different types of webinars etc I'm not going to go into it because you have your own ideas and you just be creative be free and this is just an example of how our badges badge one badge looks like and what I really appreciate about this sophisticated platform is that it shows you for example not just how the the badge looks like but also how many times you issued this badge and how many people accepted the badge and how many did not you see the five stars rating that's another brilliant thing that the earners can actually say that this is a useful badge so on the basis of the number and the the the storage of your feedback and the acceptance rate you can gauge the value of your selection of badges and that's it at the end there are the resources that you probably put into the note box so feel free to to visit any one of these sites now or or later and this is the time when I will let you have further questions and maybe recap the the chat box I don't know if I missed anything important while I was speaking yeah that answer the question if you receive badges from different issuers how will they be comparable how they fit together I don't know if who of you has a Mozilla backpack would you raise your hand if you have a Mozilla backpack okay that's not as good as I thought hopefully you're still all with me and if you have a backpack or a passport or any platform where you collect your badges that doesn't differentiate so you have a whole range of badges that you have been issued by by many people many many organizations and you decide how to cluster them so if you have event participation badges from different issuers you can just keep them in an event block and then the comparability factor is up to you and the the batch consumer your your peers your employer your prospective employer if they want if they receive a link to your collection that may be 10 badges or five badges from your collection big collection of 100 they will be able to tell themselves what the quality is for them and how comparable they are absolutely the way it looks and I'll I wonder if I should have thought about it earlier to just then open my backpack and share my screen let me see if I can still do that if I remember my password password it's like I'm maybe in let's see if I can do this I'm sharing my screen I won't be able to see you but hopefully you will be able to see my screen so this is this is all my badges that are in this Mozilla backpack I must say that I don't have all of them here I have an open badge passport but here is the important thing the collections I would get there yeah so you can create as many collections as you like you just drag your badges very very simple and straightforward and call it participant there you go and then you click public and then it goes public and then you just get a link to share add it to your CV so this is the the simple demonstration of how it's done but you can have multiple collections and they one could be about certain skills or volunteering or professional development oh excellent thank you Debbie very good question about the if there's any research evidence yet on how employers view or if they value or recognize badges and we're working on it I mentioned I mentioned the LN for work project that is actually the organizing or has organized focus groups and did a depth research about the the employers and the graduates or the job seekers valuation or of soft skills but that project is not dealing with open badges and there's the open badge network project is it's more focusing on just mainstreaming the use of open badges we are as since I don't know a few months ago working on connecting the two two projects and see how it works because in practical terms I have to say the employers are very slow to catch up but if you remember the slides from before I lost them somehow but and I go back to the versatility of the badges you do see that particularly in IT it's where so many things are happening digitally and online anyway those employers are particularly appreciative of online achievements and if somebody is a regular supporter or answers to coding questions or programming questions that gets recognized at those employers here you see there's the BBC, Siemens, NHS from from the UK, O2 and even European bodies are exploring the use of open badges I think it's just like the gunk flingers everybody's waiting who's who's moving first and how credible it is I think we are just about to to come down from the gardener cycle type and people will just begin to appreciate quality badges and once that takes off and there will be enough employers showing the good examples the others will quickly follow but that has to mean that employers change their practices but if it is true what the research says here that soft skills are so important and employers disagree with the statement that universities consider their graduates to be fit for the world of work there has to be something has to happen that brings the two stakeholder sectors closer to each other and I think badges are a great means to to facilitate that because they are so diverse and adaptable and and standard I think the key is standardized and evidence-based thank you Debbie I think I may have to issue you a facilitator badge as well because it's tremendously helpful throughout the webinar any other questions or comments do you think you would be able able to design a badge has the past one hour been useful at all I'm not sure if I should look but that's excellent thank you very much okay then oh super yes the canvas as well as this presentation as you could see on the first slide slide a creative comment feel free to to reuse and redistribute and everything so if you have any questions you you may have seen my email if you you registered if not again here's the link to the registration form on the google if you would like to receive your participant badge and you haven't registered for this webinar before please share your email and and get in touch with me if if you have any further questions or comments and I'll either answer that myself or I will just pass your inquiries on to my colleagues who are more knowledgeable than me next month or find me on linkedin here it is that's me okay then well we started two minutes late now it's two minutes early to the official finish if you don't have any questions then I wish you a very nice day for the American participants and good evening to the Europeans thank you very much for spending this one hour with me you'll receive the link to the recording so feel free to watch it again and continue working on your canvases and absolutely the best of luck with your badges share share with your success stories with with us on the open badge network website bye